


I’m Burnt Out

by lawboy



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: a collection of mini-scenes, a tiny snippet of adrienette that i didnt feel was worth tagging, because i had mad writers block and couldnt finish anything, nathalie and marinette are there but not for most of it, not for all of these pieces, using adrien to vent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-12 22:52:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14737319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lawboy/pseuds/lawboy
Summary: A small collection of scenes ft. Adrien catching my winter depression, coffee-shop!adrienette, two heroes chilling out, and a lot of flowery descriptions.





	I’m Burnt Out

**Author's Note:**

> please lower your expectations before starting :p scenes are separated by an —.

Modelling is terrifying.

With every click of the shutter, with every saved frame and shifted pose, comes the need to do better, to be more. You can't just succeed once; you can't be that unreliable. No, you have to, in each successive picture, grow more beautiful.

There is no room for failure.

 

"You just stand around and get photographed," Chloe had once said, "how hard can it be?"

She'd probably forgotten it long ago, but it stayed with him.  And when his body ached from hours-long shoots, when he walked past food he couldn’t eat, when he looked in the mirror and saw something ugly, he told himself ‘you just stand around and get photographed.’

 

"Anyone else would be happy to earn half your wage." That was his father, years ago after a draining day. The ‘stop being ungrateful’ was implied, but left unsaid.

And, yes, money was nice. _Things_ were nice, and perhaps Adrien had too many. But his room, as Nino had once put it, was fucking massive, and without things to fill it up it felt downright cavernous.

 

—

 

Sleep would be nice. Sleep would be fantastic. Sleep, at this point, would be a blessing from God.

But it was 3am and he hadn't slept. 3am, after hours and hours of staring at the backs of his eyelids and thinking about everything that had ever happened to him. For all his efforts, he was left with nothing but sore eyes, an aching head, and a heart thrumming all too rapidly against his ribcage.

3:30, and something stupid came back to him. Someone stupid. Himself, some time ago. It was an awful day, and he'd cried for so long after what he'd done. What he'd made him do. It was selfish then, and it was selfish now. Selfish tears. Dripping down his cheeks, muffled by blankets.

4:10, still cloyingly dark. He lay silent, listening to his heart race. It hurt, like a kick to the stomach, steady. Adrien wished he could shut off his brain.

 

—

 

Mocha. It clung to her heavily. Wisps of steam round her cheeks as she coerced that great, brutish machine, cold steel to her warmth.

"Small mocha."

She held out the travel mug, glanced at him expectantly. Her eyes were warmer than the coffee, burning through cardboard and glove to touch his hand. In the heat of the shop, she flushed red, brushed loose strands of midnight off her face.

He pushed some note into her palm, told her to keep the change (it was expendable). She seemed so surprised, forget-me-not eyes blinking up at him like he'd cursed.

In the cold of the street, he sipped his drink. It was lukewarm compared to her.

 

—

 

Slipping out of peaceful nothing, out of half-formed dreams and fuzzy visions, Adrien became aware of the sheets around his legs, and the cold. It wasn’t the kind that stole your breath and set you shaking; no, it was something worse— that cloying sensation of half-warmth, of almost having what you desperately crave.

He curled up. In the vastness of his bed, he was an island, a speck amongst shifting crests of blanket and smooth, ceaseless stretches of sheet.

A sudden shrill broke his thoughts. Eyes squeezed shut, Adrien stretched out an arm to silence the offender. Had anyone else been there, they might’ve appreciated the beauty in the scene: in the lily-white arm rising, disembodied, from the heaped duvet, delicate fingers probing the bedside; in its unblemished skin; its graceful, lilting motions; and the sheer contrast of its pallidity in the dark.

But no one was there. No one saw Adrien stop his alarm and go back to sleep.

 

—

 

As someone who’d tried a wider variety of delicacies than most Parisians ever even got to see, Adrien felt justified in saying that food was boring. Not just boring, but mind-numbingly dull— so incredibly so that even the thought of eating slogged him with ennui.

It was during breakfast that he decided this, that he spent time listing synonyms for ‘boring’ (in Chinese, English and French) rather than touching his poached eggs.

‘ _Because honestly,_ ’ he thought, ‘ _they taste like nothing and feel like rubber in my mouth. They’re 无聊_.’

 

Nathalie came into the dining room, tablet clutched in her arms like the child she’d never have. As far as Adrien knew, Nathalie was incapable of human emotion. She seemed to have two settings: ‘lecture’ and ‘order around’; which one she chose depended on how much of a disappointment Adrien was that day.

“You haven’t eaten.”

From the way her pitch dropped over the course of the sentence, Adrien knew he’d upset her.

“I’m not hungry.” He replied, and Nathalie frowned.

“You’re never hungry. You barely touched your dinner last night.”

Both true accusations, and Adrien knew where she must be headed. Teen supermodel stops eating? It’s a shoe-in for anorexia.

‘ _But I’m not anorexic._ ’ he reaffirmed to himself. ‘ _I’m fine with my body._ ‘

Nathalie droned on, black nails tapping loudly against her screen.

“I’ll be notifying your father.” Couldn’t she cut them? “You can’t keep acting like this. You need to see a psychologist.”

Adrien found himself rolling his eyes.

“There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just not hungry.” His tone was more biting than he’d intended. “What am I supposed to do, eat myself sick and get fat? Who’s going to model for you then?”

Nathalie blinked in surprised, then fixed him an icy glare.

“ _No one_ will be modelling for _Gabriel_ if you keep starving yourself.” She snapped.

Before Adrien could retort, she shut off her tablet and stalked out, slamming the double doors behind her.

“I’m not _starving myself._ ” Adrien said to the air.

He left his eggs untouched.

 

—

 

The sun didn’t exist at this hour. In inky night, when the sane world slept, all that winked above them were stars.

Ladybug liked it. Liked the silence, the dreamy glow of fog in predawn lights. She’d always sit on some parapet of Notre Dame, amongst gargoyles, and gaze out at the city like it loved her. And maybe, in that lucid hour, it did. Maybe it breathed to her rhythm. Maybe the thought brought her peace.

Chat liked these little windows, these pockets of time, where nothing existed but them. They didn’t need to talk, or touch, or think— they didn’t have to _be_. If they sat there for an hour it wouldn’t matter. If they voiced their darkest thoughts no one would hear. For once, he was unburdened.

In the red-eyed dawn, they sat in silence and breathed.

**Author's Note:**

> i know i haven’t updated Upside Down for a million years. the last chapter got very few comments, and that really bummed me out. i wrote the next chapter but i scrapped it all and restarted because i couldn’t be happy with it. i currently have one scene written. yes, you can kill me.
> 
> i hate to be an e-whore but please leave a comment. it’s the only way i can tell that anyone cares about what i do, and it’s the only thing that inspires me to write more (besides feeling shitty, but that just makes a bunch of scenes like this). 
> 
> thanks for reading, help me improve with constructive criticism!


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